The Guy I Almost Was (1998)
electricsheepcomix.com
electricsheepcomix.com
Even though I started several years later than he did, we graduated the same year. We got computer science degrees not art degrees (though we both are equally interested in art) so we didn't graduate into poverty like the guy in the comic. We just had to live through poverty to get our degrees.
But it's such a societal waste: this guy could have gotten a PhD in the amount of time it took him to get one bachelor's, if he hadn't had to work low wage jobs to pay for his own school.
If he graduated with minimal debt and was able to get a good paying job, I'm not seeing the societal waste.
It wasn't four years, it was eight! The poor guy had to work a YEAR for every semester of college. The amount of value lost to society due to a lack of affordable education is unbelievable.
Is it unusual for people to pay off their college loans over 8+ years? It sounds to me like he prioritized avoiding debt.
Education is absolutely affordable. You can take all kinds of college courses for free online from sites like EdX, Coursera, MIT's Open Courseware, etc. What is not free is a diploma. You have to pay for that. If you want an affordable diploma, you can go to schools that have low tuition in a lower cost part of the country. Last time I ran the numbers it wasn't hard to find a school where you could work part time during the year and full time during the summer and pay for tuition, books, and living expenses while graduating with $0 to $2000 in debt. You can do even better by starting at a community college or if you have some skill that is worth more than minimum wage.
Education is more affordable now than at any point in history because so much of it is free. Diplomas can be expensive or they can be less expensive depending on how much you want to pay.
And yeah he prioritized avoiding debt the same way a hungry animal prioritizes avoiding starvation.
Forgive me if I missed something.
What this actually represents: a systemic means to preserve the stratification of power and wealth, and to hell with human progress 'cos I got mine.
See also: barbaric healthcare practices, such as individual billing.
This isn't so far from home for me because I had a niece community college scholarship and then my parents' money to pay for my college, and I ended up not getting that degree. Years later, I got serious about it and took out my own loans to get a degree and a job. The first time around I had no plans and no idea what I was doing, but the second time I had a plan and a goal, and I achieved it. And I paid off my debt myself.
The initial money wasn't entirely wasted, but most of those credits didn't transfer towards my degree.
That was just a CC, but imagine if it was a 6 yr degree at a University instead. It'd be vastly more costly.
Congratulations on having a plan, following it, and then paying off your education. It is good to hear people saying that when so many stories are of people who never had a plan that are now complaining it is too hard to pay off all the debt they took on.
With that said, it is a meritocracy to some degree, but it's only that for the very best, who also conform to other (arbitrary) standards. Everyone else has to grind through. I think the worst part is that it's presented as something else, which a lot of people buy into.
I ultimately respect middle class nerds with a sense for abstraction and upper class leaders with fine manners and so on. But the worker, who had to make hard tradeoffs, learn to serve and deal with having little, is naturally on a different level.
You don’t know the value of work, if you never _had_ to work.
And I think the world would be a better place if the most powerful understood that.
Like there's this peculiar mentality in America that is absolutely psychotic. While those so called "menial tasks" are no doubt important, rather invaluable to functioning of society, we should not imply let alone pretend, that they provide enough. So in terms of sheer economic value, if we believe our current way of measuring labor, those "menial tasks" are in fact not valuable. Because if they were they could provide a decent life, let alone being able to provide roof over your head.
What I find bewildering is how so many Americans, even here, can justify the sheer waste of time, and psychological trauma, with "If he graduated with minimal debt and was able to get a good paying job, I'm not seeing the societal waste".
Such justifications either feel like exuding gross privilege or worse a result of some mass Stockholm Syndrome.
> But the worker, who had to make hard tradeoffs, learn to serve and deal with having little, is naturally on a different level.
Implies. Take running for example. No one in modern society "needs" to run, but I took up endurance running and doing something like running a marathon teaches you a lot. Probably many of the same lessons you're imagining.
All that to say, growing up poor I'd agree is probably pretty likely to imbue you with those learnings. It doesn't mean that people who haven't experienced scarcity have never learned those lessons.
I know there is a lot of negativity towards hard work not paying off nowadays, but doing the work you're talking about when I was younger has carried me through life. At a minimum, I wake up every morning amazed that I'm getting paid to play with and figure things out on a computer. It's a long ways from when I was a barely a teenager and my dad made me help him split firewood (he sold) using the hydraulic splitter or pick and sort oysters (he also sold in season), or the other random jobs I had until my first programming job in college.
And you're also right about there being some complexity in all jobs. I could go on about all the important lessons I learned at my various jobs that have helped me my entire career.
IMHO the parent poster is not talking about, let’s say the “inherent” value of such work, but the value our society places on it when it comes to money - aka when it comes to acquiring the basic necessities and securities of life and what it takes to live a decent life in the modern world.
Otherwise, I agree with your comment 100% and suspect several of the other posters do too.
That, consumerism, and the narrative that this country is mostly a meritocracy serve as effective barriers to people moving out of their socio-economic positions even if they are talented, hard working, and so on.
During college I worked on the dock for an LTL trucking company, and it was difficult. The pay was about double minimum wage, but given the difficulty, risk, and importance of what we did, the pay should have been more.
The Next Four Years: Beyond the student debt debate The Weeds
New America’s Kevin Carey explains loan forgiveness and the deeper problems with American higher education.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-next-four-years-be...
#1 Government underwrites student loans based on projected life time earnings.
Actuaries are smart about this stuff, right? Figure out someone's future earnings to determine their "credit worthiness". Just like buying a house. And the student's collateral is the future labor. So assess how the loan will be used. Just to be sure everyone's committed, pick a fraction that is repaid directly. Say 50%. Then plug in the numbers.
Someone going to community college to get an AA to work as a dental hygienist will need X dollars and likely earn X' over the next Y years. Another person is getting an MD PhD, who will earn 10x the future hygienist. So future doctor is eligible for a proportionally larger loan.
Tweak the incentives to encourage people to choose more needful professions. Like we may need more electricians, nurses, or language teachers for a spell.
Ya, this is how student loans kinda work now, indirectly. I just want to formalize and daylight the calculus.
I also want it to be more explicit that governments are making an investment and expect a reasonable return.
#2 Institutions are cosigners for all student loans.
Fraud has been a huge problem. So if an institution loses it's accreditation or goes kaput, they assume the full value of the loan. It's unconscionable that the students carries all that risk.
I studied mathematics at university and if you look at the typical student entering undergrad at my university, there was a high chance they would go into further education after the degree, and a somewhat smaller chance they would become an academic (though this is the outcome the university was focusing on). There was a reasonable chance they would go on to a reasonably ordinary middle class job, and a small but significant chance they would go into a highly paid field like investment banking. It seems it would be terrible for those incoming students to take out loans against their expected future income because the average is pushed up by a small proportion of high-paying careers, while many students may choose to go into lower paying jobs (e.g. being phd students).
The problem is that the greatest burden falls on those who fail to meet the income expectations. I think such a system is regressive, at least in the technical sense.
Obviously with the hind sight of being someone with a reasonable amount of success, one might want to have had a system like the one you describe, but I think I wouldn’t want my friends who e.g. went on towards academia to have suffered such a system, and perhaps the pressure of needing to find work to repay loans would have led to a worse outcome for me.
I think I would want a system where the risks are socialised to at least a large extent. But I sympathise that some people don’t like the idea of others going off to get certain degrees that don’t really lead to improved financial outcomes, and the more serious issue of not having a way to incentivise certain courses[1].
In the uk we have a bizarre system of “loans” where if you are from a wealthy family you pay upfront for university, if you are not so wealthy the government pays for your tuition (for a certain amount of time) and provides money to cover living expenses as a “loan”, and if you are more poor the government (and if you’re lucky your university) will provide extra money towards your living costs as a grant. The “loan” accrues interest at a somewhat high rate (that depends on how much money you make) but isn’t really like a loan because it is paid back based on income (one pays 9% of gross monthly income above a threshold of about £20k/12) and written off after 30 years. This means that while people who don’t earn so much money don’t have an impossible burden after university, it is people with middle incomes who end up paying back the most in absolute terms (e.g. getting the balance down to 0 just before the 30 years is up and paying a lot of interest) while those with high incomes can quickly pay off the loans without paying so much interest and then enjoy an effective 10% pay rise. It seems this system is also somewhat regressive.
The linked podcast episode touches on some of our bigger inequity challenges. My only notion is restore state funding to public institutions (to greatly reduce tuition burden). It varied greatly by state. My own state's universities used to be ~80 state funded and are now almost ~100 tuition funded. So wrong.
Maybe also treat loan for private institutions differently. It's really distasteful that our elites universities are hoarding so much cash (endowments). They should use it or lose it.
Edit:
Another reform for mitigating inequity may be increasing supply to meet demand. I truly don't understand this dynamic. Admissions are down overall. But demand for the elites is ever greater. Meanwhile newly 100% tuition supported orgs are now dependent on foreign exchange students. Ad nauseam...
It seems to me the Pareto curve of credential issuing orgs has to be releveled. The elite have to either expand enrollment or partner with other orgs to share the glory or...?
I've read a lot of criticisms (gripes), but can't remember any policy proposals. The most concrete I've seen is Scott Galloway's new MBA teaching startup (https://www.section4.com), which really looks like an ITT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Technical_Institute) or Phoenix University model, but I really don't know.
I’ll also throw in the idea (as an addition not a replacement to what you say) of national service in some form which isn’t military service (lots of ways to help the country beyond the military) and the government funding a university education to some degree in exchange for that.
idealy one would think so, but the issue is we have paired our democracy with economics that demand compound annual growth, and where the money goes, so follows everything else...
Or often we have a glut into 'trendy' major that have fuzzy benefits to the society (think marketing/pr). Since it is not a specialized skill, many do have trouble finding jobs in their field.
The barista at my favorite coffee place, had a marketing/pr degree... you just don't need a college degree to make coffee. If she never finds a job in her field, or something that requires college degree, it would have been wasted money and a loss to society.
If you have to give free college, it has to be conditioned to things that do benefit the economy/society (engineering, teachers, medicine, etc). This introduced a different problem, that is 'state planing'.
I think you're missing the word "financial" there, going by the rest of your comment.
Further, who's to say college is a society-profiting institution? Why them and not, say, circuses? Movie houses? Candy manufacturers? Are we so poor a nation, that we have to cut institutions to the bone and they all have to be mercenary money makers?
Educated populace makes for better voters. Which God knows we need.
However.
This episode is about the current proposals for patching up our current system. This following summary is so over generalized as to certainly be mostly wrong; so please just read it as indicative of the policy challenges:
Currently, each state runs their own higher education institutions (university, community colleges, voc tech, etc). The feds currently handle the student loans. (States and institutions also receive grants, research monies, etc. YMMV.)
In our future perfect free school system, feds would give money to the states to spend. Since the feds can't just tell states what to do, there may be some kind of carrot & stick arrangement, like how the highway funds were dispersed.
But that's no guarantee that state's will sign up or play nicely. For example, look at the spotty adoption of Medicare expansion. Some states declined FREE MONEY, which had very few strings, because of REASONS.
Which leads us back to today's Gordian knot. How do the feds design and implement a fair system which is strenuously opposed by some states and a lobby of the most powerful universities? The feds don't want to enable dysfunctional states who are screwing over their own students. The feds also want to avoid rewarding bad behavior, eg giving bad states the same deal as good states.
So right now it seems the best leverage the feds have is thru student loans. Hopefully our nation progresses to something more reasonable.
[1] I have no idea what free higher education would look like. I was pretty happy with my state's pre-Reagan funding model; not quite free, but still very generous. I do accept that students have to have some "skin in the game". Civil or military service leading to free education is great. And I also accept that just giving institutions money, no strings attached, leads to bad outcomes. So maybe a hybrid system; 50% state funded directly, 25% student funded (self or loans), and 25% vouchers (like charter schools). But I'm open to any reasonable, pragmatic system.
I've seen it in 'incentives' to develop local railway-adjacent properties. City subsidized rents, but they just advertised 'premium' apartments and the rent is the same/higher than elsewhere. The developer pockets the incentive.
Lest we imagine that some institutions to lower their rates because of Fed support, that isn't happening now and rates are already well above what it takes to run a college.
Story of graft is as old as history.
But somehow I'm optimistic. Management and governance are technologies too. (h/t Peter Drucker) We can do better. We will do better.
How do we incentive desired outcomes? Ensure feed back loops are working? Thwart conflicts of interest? Try out new ideas, run experiments? Share best practices?
I've been wandering around for 20 years, hoping to meet other people (locally) who apply Drucker, Deming, Everett Rogers, etc. paradigms to policy nuts and bolts. Something like this, but for the close combat of actual work:
https://ssir.org/issue/winter_2021
I've started to read about participatory democracy (h/t David Graeber), but have yet to find people applying those strategies at work.
Last week, my politic & policy bestie turned me onto holocracy. I'm still chewing on it, am rather skeptical tbh, so won't share any links.
Meanwhile, we don't need to fix any and everything. It's enough to make some improvements, lick our wounds, and then do it all again.
That said, lots of things are hard :). Which I don’t think you’re necessarily disagreeing with.
Take your time. No pressure.
The idea I have gotten from it (and my own life) is that "big movements" (zeitgeists) don't really end up meaning much personally. They are created by the media and historians, either before or after things happen.
This guy got into tech by getting a temp job. He needed the money, and Apple needed somebody to enter data.
I guess a moral of the story is, if you want to be a part of the "future", you are better off entering data for a company actually building the future, rather than hanging out with people who sit around talking about what it might be like.
Even if there are nothing to be learned here, very enjoyable and it's old enough that I think I may have read it before 15+ years ago.
Corollary: spend less time reading and writing comments on HN.
I read once Google makes one hire for every thousand applications. He lucked out getting into a FAANG company when he did (albeit at a lowly position).
Someone of his means can not snap their fingers and get a gig in FAANG. With those gates up, he is just marinating in the culture which is accessible.
Also, being in that culture, he sees opportunity when he lands at Apple. Plenty of other people who worked alongside him qprobably saw it as just a data entry opportunity to pay rent.
While Mondo 2000, Wired etc. may have been forced, I don't think they were completely fraudulent. The people and subcultures they covered already existed, they just kind of cobbled them all together. Of course the editorial biases put a slanted tint on things - the average hacker is not as libertarian as Louis Rossetto envisioned or as into extropianism as RU Sirius imagined. But those magazines put people on their covers who were not on magazine covers before as far as I know (example - free open source pioneer and Cygnus founder John Gilmore).
The zeitgeist was created by the media, but not out of whole cloth, there was something going on and raw materials to work with. In retrospect, the media in the center of it got some things right and some things wrong.
Similar story with friends and family who struggled against communism behind the Iron Curtain. Some wish they'd just gotten good careers set up instead.
My read is that "the guy I almost was" would be a homeless dude who lugged around an old typewriter with him.
I enjoyed the critique of the whole cyber/futurism movement, though.
Do libraries not let you inside unless you have a card in California?
Because there's not a single library I've been to that required a library card to enter or spend time at the library. I only have a library card for my city, but I've been to libraries all over the suburbs to read their books (on the premises), write, attend events, and even secure meeting rooms (just needed my driver's license).
Actually when I was poor that was one thing I did a decent amount of, was just hang out at libraries. Although I've never been so poor I didn't own a working computer, either, although I came close once. One time, when my computer died I spent a couple weeks hunting down a cheap one (just the tower) for $80 on Craigslist that wasn't too much of a downgrade from what I had (mine was kind of old to begin with).
I don't remember exactly what was wrong with it. I want to say it was the power supply fried, but if that's the case, I don't know why I thought I couldn't just buy a replacement for the same cost. Maybe I just felt I couldn't afford to take the chance.
But at the same time his plan for changing his life was to start going to the library. :)
Does it? The public library system where I live offers free cards. I think it's just as likely for a school to include the library card cost in tuition and charge for it otherwise.
My guess is "Santa Luna" is actually Santa Cruz, and their library cards are free too (at least now, but I suspect that it hasn't changed). My guess is that since this was written after the fact, there's just some haziness on what was actually the case, and why he didn't frequent the library as much (which might be as simple as that the hours he was out and walking the neighborhood were often not library hours).
The fact that this was written in '98 is interesting too. Seems like every generation goes through this journey. A bright optimism followed by intense disillusionment and then reaching a compromise and balance with their visions of the future and the complex realities of life.
I wonder how Gen Z will respond to their trial, especially in the hyper-competitive world where everyone wants to be a "founder".
Imagine the meanest dumbest thing you ever said at 19 or whatever.
Now that's a part of a permanent record that could come back to haunt you well into your thirties. I often shake my head whenever I hear of a story of someone who wrote something nasty as a teenager on Twitter or something, and as an adult their life is ruined over it.
Like we all didn't say stupid mean things in our youth. Now it's just easier to broadcast it all over the world.
With Social media the only winning move is not to play
Future startup business idea? Reasonably scandalous fake social media posts, enough to seem real but not enough to truly exclude you from anything.
The Diamond Age was another Cyberpunk thriller. It and Snowcrash were fairly tight novels without endless tangents and I think I like them best of his novels I've read.
Fall Or Dodge In Hell is the book referenced and it's a loose sequel to REAMDE. (Which is a really fun techno-thriller novel that explores what happens when ransomeware locks up some very bad people's computers.)
Cryptonomicon is a fantastic fictionalization of Alan Turing and breaking the enigma code combined with a cool story about what encryption can do in the future.
Snowcrash is probably his most famous and is very cyberpunk and awesome. (Not my favorite of his though.)
Not getting married used to be cause for ostracism. Having child out of wedlock. Having long hair as a male!
There will always be busy body haters who find a reason to exclude you, to elevate themselves above you. They are fucks. And unless you want to be one of them, are utterly ignorable. Most people worth knowing, don't care.
We all talked crap at some point in the past.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/mimi-groves-jimmy-gall...
Did you read the article? If so, what then was your take on it?
[EDIT: um, also, I believe it is right and ethical to feel outrage about racism, so I appreciate journalism which points it out and discusses it. And; the article was a lot more nuanced than “driving outrage about racism.” That’s a pretty shallow interpretation - the article is clear about the complications of the kind of “outing” that occurred and shared multiple views about it. I think maybe your implication was that said racism does not exist in this case? Feel free to explain more about what you meant :)]
What happened doesn't resemble a meaningful fork between two possible lives. Fate (and Apple) really made the decision for him, it's implausible he would have ever rejected that job given the circumstances.
It's really really good.
Almost Guy is still my favorite but "Night at the rave" is just so wholesome I love it too. "A Suitable Seed"s message still hits just as hard today as it did in the 90s. Farley makes great comics.
The Jain's Death http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/jain/01.html
Rush Limbaugh Eats Everything https://web.archive.org/web/20001109233800/http://www.e-shee...
From an interview on the front page, a snippet that captures a bit of that feeling:
> ..There was this whole alternate, intellectual, metaphysical kind of thought in the 90s about where things were going. The Terrence McKenna school — we are going to find a way to get free of these monkey bodies and we’re going to find a way to enter other dimensions and we’re going to expand intelligence and extend life. We’re going to break free of a lot of these things that have held us monkeys back for thousands of years.
> There’s a sadness when you hear [Robert Anton Wilson] talking about that now because it didn’t happen. The world now is even more fucked up than when he wrote Illuminatus! It just seems like we’ve been completely incapable of breaking free of that stuff. We’re still fighting the same pathetic cultural wars, the same primitive religious wars, despite our best angels pushing us forward to get better. The vast majority of humanity is just this epic failure. It’s sad.
How was living through the 80s? I wasn't born then but find the subculture fascinating.
Did you make gazillions from being invested in tech through the 90s until now (lots of assumptions made here).
Do you miss anything about life in the past(beyond nostalgia)?
1. The 80s sucked. I was a dateless nerd in a shitty town in a shitty state for most of it. They got marginally better when I went to college in the more sophisticated and urbane state to the immediate east.
And that state was Alabama. No kidding, UA was MILES more sophisticated than the crappy college town I grew up in. I think this is probably because the University had much, much more influence in Tuscaloosa than USM had in Hattiesburg.
The music was cool, though. The last waves of punk plus the waves of more indie-style stuff, plus the explosion in Athens, GA, all made for great tunes. To this day, the opening chords of REM's first albums are incredibly transportive and soothing to me. (And one of the only times I've ever been truly star-struck is when I found myself in line at an airport bookstore behind Mike Mills.)
2. In the late 90s, I was briefly (and theoretically) rich on paper. Not "Netscape stock" rich or "MSFT rich," but worth about $5MM. Sadly, it was not liquid, and became worth $0 in short order. I was an investing partner in an Internet tech consultancy -- mostly, custom web sites and software, which at the time you could charge a lot of money for -- but didn't have enough stock to turn the boat. We got sucked into the massive-land-grab mentality, and tried to go toe to toe vs. firms like Agency, and predictably lost. But had we aimed lower we could've been a tidily profitable regional player. The lesson is that there's nothing WRONG with mid-market, you know?
The experience cost me actual money (not options), but it was also incredibly educational, and cheaper than grad school would've been, so I'm not sore about it.
Sadly, the dot-com crash left me richer only in skills. I had to burn savings to keep my house from late 2001 through early 20003, when I started making money again.
3. I have enjoyed my life in every state. At 50, I could prattle on about this or that that used to be cooler, but so many things are manifestly cooler NOW it's a bankrupt enterprise. And God knows I don't want to come off like some bellyaching boomer. I mean, think about it: how much would this pandemic have sucked in an era without broad connectivity and online community? There's widespread enough bandwidth, and good enough software, that my 80 year old mother can very easily initiate a video call with anyone she likes. Sure, most of the folks who post on HN probably had online pals they were gaming with or chatting with or working with a decade ago, but the non-digital would've been materially more isolated.
However, I will admit I definitely miss the Internet before Eternal September happened. There's more HERE now, but the broad internet culture moved from fairly intelligent and articulate to, well, nihilism. Few places reward multi-sentence or multi-paragraph expression now. (HN is a very notable exception.)
In my eyes, the issue with modern internet communities is that there are too many people there "just for the sake of it". I find that communities focused on a specific thing don't suffer from the repetitive and bland drivel that fills the front pages of most discussion websites.
Due to the nature of this advice, I won't just list a bunch of forums and discussion boards I look at and post on. I'd recommend you search for places based on your interests.
Seems appropriate to the comic. So, the recession lasts ~18000yrs, eh? At least they’ve solved the problem of death, although I presume you are still taxed?
One thing living through several generations and reading/knowing lots of history. Every period is fine. Everyone believes their period to be special, they aren't. Things happen in cycles, very little is revolutionary. Every period has it's big events and sucks and is great. People's experiences are mostly the same. People just don't learn/know history.
Newp I didn't have money to invest. I "retired" (in quotes cuase I didn't have money) at 30ish, and biked around europe for a year. Ran company into ground playing MTG and video games instead of running business. career didn't really start to take off until 38 or so. I've done fine and feel lucky for it.
Not really miss. Would be great having youth now that I'm smart and wise and wealthy (compared to young). As young person it's hard to believe/understand the vigor, mental endurance and "wide eyedness" of youth. But all periods of life are fine. Enjoy and make maximal use of every period of your life.
We reject fashion, or certain types of work, or various things in order to find something else or define ourselves, but it's not really clear if we ever really understood those things or that by doing so we learn / go anywhere.
It reminds me of what Roger Ebert said of the film "Reality Bites" (sticking to the 1990s vibe):
"the deep-seated prejudices of the movie, which are that anyone who shoots documentary video footage of friends is a genius; anyone who is pushing 30 and has a good job has sold out; and anyone who is simultaneously unemployed and hostile is a reservoir of truth."
Well, I guess some kids grow up earlier than others ...
Makes it so much more enjoyable to experience.
Well, our cars didn't shoot around the world in hamster-tubes, but our thoughts and ideas sure did and you know, I think in the end that was probably a lot smarter.
The "hedonism" stuff? Well don't know about you guys but I sure lived that thru the bands and the all the raves and shit I managed to find myself at in the late 80's and 90's.
Yes..of course life almost always smashes our childhood dreams. Big deal get over it, but I think it's important to always remember the positive along with the crap.
At any turn during the story, the author could have become something much worse. He could have become a drunk, he could have become homeless. The invisible hand of the economy dangled his future in front of him as a tease and then handed him a job in the end as a threat, telling him never to be ungrateful or else.
It's a retrospective on the ways in which average people can have their lives warped by externalities. At the end the author wonders about the version of himself that became beatnik, but what about those versions of himself that became drunk and homeless? Well, those don't exist in parallel universes. They exist in this universe, as other people in the same situation as him, the same situation shared by 90% of people.
I think an alternate reading of the well-written story perhaps is how much of what we do is driven by dumb luck, and those just as smart and driven as we are here commenting are, through very little fault of their own, homeless and addicted because they just were not "in the right place at the right time" once or twice, or met the wrong person at a bad time in their life?
You talk about lives "warped by externalities" and man, ain't that the truth.
So I spent my 1983 summer break on our porch with my dad's Hermes 3000 writing the primitives of a FORTH interpreter in 6809 assembly language (I may have written an earlier draft in long hand; I don't recall). When school started again in the fall, I entered my manuscript and got the interpreter to run with not all that much trial and error (considering I had little prior assembly programming experience).
I swear I was not trying to be a hipster!
Around the time the comic first came out, I wish I'd seen it earlier, since I hadn't been skeptical enough of "magazine visionaries". He hit some of the traits and behaviors on the head.
If you were to re-tell this story in 2020 it ends with the fellow living in the homeless encampment but still trying to stay clean and timely enough to make it to his data entry job
--------
To put it another way: The author happened to be born very close to the peak for average Americans' wages, and every year since then has been an ever-tighter vice squeeze between declining wages and rising rents (in both the real estate and economic senses of the term)
The "guy he almost was" is homeless in 2020, if he isn't dead. There's nothing to envy in that life.
In history there might be one maybe two generations that have had less hardship than mine, every other generation ever has had more hardship.
It is easy to complain about how hard life is, but I really don't think most people would be willing to trade it for some other time in the past--no matter how bad they like to think things are today. It is surprisingly inexpensive to live like people lived in the 1950s when TV, air conditioning, and even indoor plumbing weren't things you'd assume you had to have.
Note: 80% of millionaires are first-generation rich - they started off with little, and made their own fortune.
Nevertheless, thank you for showing your privilege. Judgement made.
Not to mention, I don't know where you folks develop your anecdotes -- you really do meet a lot of totally ordinary, high-functioning adults in soup kitchen and community pantry scenarios. They just happen to be broke and hungry.
At any given time, most homeless families are only temporarily homeless, and most hungry families are only temporarily hungry. Life has its ups and downs. Most of the adults spend most of their lives working, just like everyone else does.
The "hardcore," long-term homeless, who spend years at a time unhomed, are not terribly representative of the great mass of Americans who have spent some time unhomed.
Poverty is endemic in America, and it's a hard time to be a working stiff, especially if you work in, say, the Bay area, as the comic's author did. ("Santa Luna" seems like a very thinly fictionalized Santa Cruz.)
A man like the author, in 2020, could very well find himself in the encampment he so obviously feared.
The comment that started this discussion involved observing people visiting a soup kitchen. Short-term homeless may outnumber long-term homeless in an absolute metric (I was homeless for a few months in 2014) but long-term homeless make many more lifetime visits to a soup kitchen and therefore comprise a higher proportion of the people you meet. They also comprise a higher proportion of the people who are at any given time living on the street. If you solve short-term homelessness but not long-term homelessness, you haven't made nearly as much of a dent in the shelter beds and tent cities as you have in the quoted statistic of people who are ever homeless.
I'm sure you do meet "high-functioning adults" in soup kitchens, but I would also doubt they're the modal attendees.
For example if a typical longtime homeless person would make (round number) 400 visits a year, and a typical transiently homeless person would make around 40 visits a year, then if eg there were 20 transiently homeless people a year for every longtime homeless person, then the makeup of a soup kitchen would be two-thirds transiently homeless.
I do get it. When people think about homelessness, when they cast a ballot, we don't want them to think about the "hardcore" (as you put it) unsympathetic homeless. We want them to think about the more relatable people experiencing transitional homelessness. People who are leaving an abusive situation, people working a job that didn't cover their rent, etc. The Rosa Parkses of homelessness.
And that sucks. It sucks that the "hardcore" homeless are so stigmatized that the only acceptable way to talk about helping them is to frame a larger problem in which they can be hidden away as an unrepresentative minority.
The thing about what you call hardcore homelessness is the serious mental health issues many of those people have. And that is much bigger harder issue.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Source: myself, after college, working at a bakery in a Midwestern city.
This memoir was not about Topeka, Kansas. Not that struggling to make rent doesn't happen in Topeka. Not that Topeka isn't filled with people living vibrant lives.
Just, this particular story occurred in the Bay area.
That's obviously not universal. But it is certainly the story of THIS guy, as well as many tens of millions of other Americans.
It is absolutely possible to live a frugal but reasonable lifestyle on a minimum wage job in most of the country.
The average American lives in a fairly considerable city, depending on your definition of "large." The vast majority live in cities of 100,000 or more.
Almost half of Americans live in the 100 largest MSAs. For perspective, the #100 MSA is Fort Wayne, Indiana, at roughly 500,000 people.
Not to mention, struggling to make rent, homelessness, and poverty don't just vanish when you step away from the most expensive cities.
Living in "Santa Luna" (which I assume was actually Santa Cruz) instead of the suburbs where he worked didn't make his rent affordable in 1994, and it certainly wouldn't today, in 2020.
It is completely possible to survive on a minimum wage job in many cities across the country. It isn’t luxurious, it isn’t fair, and it certainty isn’t ideal, but exaggerating the facts to make a sociopolitical point only makes the opposition have a stronger foothold.
I'm glad you were able to get by on the cheap in an unspecified midwestern city, but that doesn't change the picture for tens of millions of other people
> The average American doesn’t live in NYC/LA/SF, they live in a small to medium size town.
http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-cities-factsheet
"It is estimated that 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, up from 64% in 1950."
Demographic shifts are weird, man.
I'm part of this big shift - I moved from a rural town in flyover country, to a giant metro area in flyover country. That metro area is most of the population of my state. It's sobering - you add up all the little rural towns and the number of people there just doesn't add up to much. That wasn't true, in the past. And it's like this in almost every state. We all moved to the city because all the farming jobs and factory jobs dried up.
It's a very, uh, Bay-centric view of the world that would lump those three together.
Meaning just over half live in the rest, with far lower cost of living.
Ignoring the facts of urban poverty because rural areas exist, at all, is ... not a great way to think about problems.
The census data >80% of Americans live in urban areas but that’s loosely defined as any area with more than 2500 people
I don't really have a horse in this race as I'm an EU citizen and have never lived in the USA, but I am curious to know: have you, yourself, done this (what you say is absolutely possible)?
It certainly wasn't a luxurious lifestyle and I wouldn't wish it upon anyone, but it also wasn't much different than living in a dorm at college...or even the startup lifestyle, seeing that this is HN. Absolutely doable for a young person (as the original link is about) and not a straight ticket to homelessness.
For what it's worth, I also spent quite a bit of time traveling around Europe and had many art student friends living on half as much money in smaller cities in France, Germany, etc.
When I was 16, I worked at a bakery too, as an apprentice. I made a pittance and lived in a squat because I couldn't afford rent, but I enjoyed the work and I could eat of the produce to my heart's content (I have a big heart). This was in Athens, Greece, btw.
On the other hand, neither I nor you had a family at the time we worked such low-pay jobs and I suspect that a minimum wage job would not be sufficient for two adults wanting to start a family.
1.) median wage in America for ALL workers is around $28k a year -- meaning this guy was, supposedly on his "minimum wage" job, earning more than fully half of all Americans. Think about that. He was in the upper half of the income distribution, on "minimum wage" ? really?
(A typical minimum wage job pays $10k a year BEFORE taxes -- 28 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, $7.25 an hour. It is extremely rare for low wage employers to allow an employee to work more than 29 hours a week, as it may oblige them to offer benefits at the 30 hour mark, and extra pay at the 40 hour mark.)
2. There is not a single state in the union where median rents are as low as he describes -- did he just rent the very cheapest room in the entire 50 states?
https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/research/median-...
Americans love telling each other stories about how they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but they also love to omit the details of how they got things like 45 hours a week, or made more than 50% of American workers, despite working for a "minimum wage," or got paid time and a half on his "minimum wage" job, or found housing near a job center at below the median cost for even the most rural and blighted parts of the country.
All of these, individually, are staggeringly unlikely. Together, they come off as the luckiest man alive. It seems impossible unless he was working in his uncle's bakery and living in his brother's apartment.
(The refreshing thing about this comic is that the author didn't blow smoke up our asses about "bootstraps," it's very plain he felt lucky to escape his situation.)
Just because an expensive new car is very expensive does not mean that a vehicle is out of reach of everyone who can't afford an expensive new vehicle.
The market will only adjust wages if people are behaving rationally. Staying in a very expensive place with low wages breaks the market because it isn't rational behavior.
At the same time as supporting the cities they live in doing all of the most fundamental work (cooking, cleaning, etc) they are regularly disrespected and told to fuck off somewhere else if they're struggling - away from the support network they rely upon and the friends and family who give their life meaning.
And yeah, some of them did move away but that sometimes made things worse because even though they might be financially slightly better situated in a different city, they didn't have a support network there.
Expensive housing is a political choice. Watering down the minimum wage was a political choice. These people falling through the cracks and suffering was the outcome of those deliberate choices to prioritize pumping up asset prices and profit margins over actual people.
Most people don't quite understand how homelessness works, and it's because of this whole "support network" thing. In most people's mind, homeless = bum living in a cardboard box. What actually happens in reality is someone falls on hard times and they move in with a relative, or bum a room from a friend, or etc, etc. That's what keeps them out of the cardboard box, and keeps them fed.
And that's why they're shit scared to move. Move, and all those friends and family can't help you. Even scarier, move, and you're probably scared the whole friends-and-family ties might get weaker - most people are always paranoid about whether their friends/lovers/etc still care about them, so they stay close to make sure they're "tending the fire" and keeping the friendship alive. It's human.
It is known that the FSP is holy, for it shall cure all our ails with nary a lift of our clicky fingers. /snark.
The market is us. We will adjust wages if people are behaving rationally - but people don't. The market isn't some external, independently existing force; it's observations about our collective actions. We're the market. It's weird (to me) every time that term is used that way.
> it isn't rational behavior
Of course not, people aren't rational, but even if they were, you'd still be (generally) incorrect. People coming to decisions that are against your expectations is much more commonly about your lack of visibility into other forces and information than it is about their cognitive processing.
And then comes maintenance of a 30yo vehicle! Total cost of ownership was about $3k/y, not including gas.
Even cheap cars ain't cheap, and that's one of many reasons that poverty is a spiral.
How bad is your driving record, and are you getting anything beyond liability? I have paid about that much, for 2 cars, and I have a lot more than liability. Even now, for 2 cars I'm paying under $1300/year - and have more than liability coverage. When I paid the bare minimum, for 1 car, the most I paid is $600/year. Even adjusting for inflation, it would not amount to over $1000/year today. And I paid that only for 1-2 years while building enough of a driving record. Looking at my financial records, when I had just liability on an old car, I typically paid $350/year.
> More expensive if you do a monthly payment plan.
Not all plans are like this. For the last few years I've been on a plan that costs the same whether I do monthly or annual. Shop around.
> And then comes maintenance of a 30yo vehicle! Total cost of ownership was about $3k/y
First, if you paid $3000 for a 30 year old car, it's a bad deal. 2 years ago I bought a 15 year of Honda Accord for $3500, and it did not have a lot of miles. Second, if you're paying $3000/year for maintenance, you bought a bad car. Sell it and get a reliable car. As an example, I paid $350 this year for maintaining my car (including oil changes). I paid about $1100 last year. Looking at my prior old car, I've gone as low as $100/year. In fact, looking back at almost 10 years, that $1100 was the most I've ever paid for maintaining an old car.
> Even cheap cars ain't cheap, and that's one of many reasons that poverty is a spiral.
Good cheap cars are always cheaper than the alternatives. Always.
So that would come to: $11k $11k $20k $20k ----- $62k
The $16k we budgeted for personal expenses is probably a bit high and I living on campus is much more expensive than other options, but at $15 per hour, you'd only need to work half time to cover all your expenses.
So lets say you work 20 hours a week for 39 weeks during the school year and 40 hours for 13 during the summer. That is 1,300 hours per year. You need to bring in $11.9 per hour to cover your expenses without being particularly frugal. If you live at home, live off campus and cook your own food, graduate a semester early, etc. you can drop your costs down by quite a bit.
For students who did ok in highschool (3.5 GPA, 29 on ACT) the university will give you at least a $2k scholarship. Pell grants will give you up to $5k that you don't need to pay back depending on your financial need. Graduating debt free is very VERY doable.
Then, you are leaving your entire support system when you move. When you are poor, your support system is how you live. Friends watch each other's kids while they work, they share needed things, they find jobs for each other, they lend money to each other when unexpected things happen, they let people crash on their couch when they lose their house.
Telling poor people to abandon their social support system to move somewhere cheaper is really underselling how hard that is.
Or a bus/Amtrak ticket, and some money to ship your stuff. This is me, twice. It's not that expensive. It's not even painful. It's normal - what most people do.
> You will need first and last months rent (not to mention how will you find a cheap place in a city you have no connections in without being there?)
I have never paid first and last month's rent for deposit. Having dabbled in real estate, I do know this is a thing and not that unusual. I also know this is not the norm. I've often paid deposits of amounts like $200. These are decent apartments - not crap ones, but not high end ones either. I remember the one time someone asked more than one month's rent, I simply found a comparable apartment a few blocks away. It didn't require much of a search because probably over 80% of the apartment complexes in that neighborhood did not charge that much.
As for finding a "cheap" place, all it takes is the Internet.
> Telling poor people to abandon their social support system to move somewhere cheaper is really underselling how hard that is.
Both having done this, and seeing others do this from the now expensive place I live in: I can assure you the success stories outnumber the fail stories 10 to 1. Easily. Your support system in the expensive city is not much use if you cannot afford to pay rent. Your argument has validity if you're moving between comparable cities, but we're talking about people who are, in a sense, already below 0. The baseline sucks, despite whatever social support they have.
Of course, if you're starting with $0 in hand, you're screwed no matter where you are. Barring medical expenses or similar sudden expenses, most people who end up there do so via the boiling frog syndrome. The trick is to get out when you see that your finances are dropping.
Also, many poor people aren't starting with $0... they are starting with negative money
This was addressed in my comment - although perhaps I added that portion in while you were typing yours.
> You leave out having kids, and the childcare support that is needed if you can't afford daycare.
Definitely. There are many subtopics in this thread and my intention was to focus on only one, which was the expense to move to a cheaper city. With children, it's a lot more expensive, but to be frank, as per the original comment in this thread - you couldn't afford to live on minimum wage with dependents even in the 90's - that aspect has not changed and only gotten worse.
I was referring to a single person with no debt and a small amount of cash.
To be clear, I'm not saying anyone who is poor can get out of it easily (or even at all). I'm saying some definitely can. Nor am I saying there aren't institutional problems that make it harder for people and easier to get into debt (predatory advertising and loans, for example - heck - the whole credit system). In many ways being poor in the US is worse than in many/most developed countries. I acknowledge that.
But there's a difference between a bad situation and an impossible one.
I merely want to push back on a sentiment I see often on HN and other places (and usually only by people earning good amounts of money) that it's a bad idea or incredibly difficult to leave a coastal city to move to a cheap one and do better there than here. I see it time and again on these threads, and for me it's a huge cognitive dissonance, as I've lived in both places, and have encountered several people in both places who made the move. It's not easy, but as I said, the success cases far outnumber the failed ones.
The last set of people I know who moved from my city to a cheaper one were low income workers (cooks in a restaurant who were treated poorly). They had families with kids - some did not have a working spouse. They saw cheap houses in Ohio (under $100K) and immediately made the move. Granted, they're now living in shitty neighborhoods (the only place you'll find such houses), but they have positive cash flow. And now that they're successful, their so called social support they had here is now considering making that move as well.
My scenario in my original comment was about getting a decent apartment. I've seen people come in to the cheaper city I lived in with not enough cash to make any kind of deposit. Yet most were still successful in the long run. The exceptions were people with some kind of chronic problem: Drugs, health issues, crime related issues, behavioral issues (can't handle bosses) etc. They'd usually find some charity/religious institution who would provide them a roof for a fixed period of time and in that time they'd find a job and then move out to a real apartment. Most of these cities will have places that will rent you a room for fairly cheap. Crappy neighborhood, etc.
The contrast is with staying in an expensive city where no matter what they do they will not get positive cash flow. Whatever your views on the topic, keep this one fact in mind: The baseline we are comparing against is staying in a city with negative cash flow.
I was not disagreeing that SOME people can move. I am saying that it isn't blanket advice that you can give to every poor person living in a big city.
My main issue is that the advice to 'move somewhere cheaper' is often used as a way to dismiss the seriousness of poverty, that all it takes is some personal decisions and you won't be poor anymore. In other words, it is poor people's fault for being poor (because they choose to live in an expensive city).
Yes, there are lots of techniques that many individuals can use to improve their personal situation. However, that doesn't mean that we have solved the societal issues that are leading to widespread poverty.
It's not easy to get work authorization documents because there is a huge queue for legal immigration (for example, my friend's cousin just moved here from a country on the Indian subcontinent, after having waited more than 15 years for a visa), while people in Mexico/Central America/wherever need to improve their situation NOW; they simply cannot wait the decade or so it would take to obtain real documents, even if they had the money required to even start the process.
Living and working in the US without authorization is a criminal offense, and if caught by someone who cares enough, illegal immigrants will be deported and permanently barred from obtaining legitimate work authorization.
Of course, there's always the option of counterfeit...
Yeah... This isn't true. You can see the data here, among other places: https://www.statista.com/chart/17679/real-wages-in-the-unite.... The average real hourly wage is higher today than any time since 68 (which was the peak) and is about a dollar higher than the 90s. Note that this is the real hourly wage, so it's already inflation adjusted.
This was true until 2019. Wages dropped in the late 70s and in the 80s, then went up in the 90s, spent the 00s mostly flat, and rose a little in the 10s. It took 50 years (until 2019) for them to go back up to the 1968 high. So "we've made no progress since 1970" economic quotes are mostly true, but "we've made no progress since 199x" economic quotes are mostly false.
Those comments are an interesting read-through, since more than one person directly challenges the relevance of the submission. These days, not many people on this website would feel that a short personal retrospective on cyber culture and the 90s is out-of-place. Was the HN of a decade ago more hardline with its focus on interesting hacker pieces?
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